Not the most concise title but I wanted to cover a bit of ground with it. I am leading a week long Multi Platform development residential lab next week in the Southern Highlands of New South Wales with some of the worlds leading mentors and Australia’s top projects – all linked to Screen Australia. This is followed by a one day seminar in Melbourne called ‘Idea to Market’ and top and tailing all of this, I have taken up the Executive Producer ABC Multi Platform TV role. More on each coming up.

Intensive Clinic

As you know last year I founded StoryLabs, a global transmedia IP development network, with 3 other individuals in Canada, US and UK. Then, new format funding body, Screen Australia who were looking for a very practical, production orientated rapid development structure for their Digital Ignition initiative, looked to StoryLabs.

Screen Australia has engaged transmedia collective StoryLabs to direct the first workshop, under the guidance of its key founder Gary Hayes. He is recognised as one of the foremost digital thinkers. An award-winning multi-platform producer, author, educator and director. The founding director of global multi-platform training initiative StoryLabs he has recently become Exec Producer of ABC Multi Platform TV. He was the director of AFTRS’s LAMP program for 5 years, was Senior Interactive Development Producer at the BBC for 8 years, and was a Social TV Producer in the US. Gary has designed and lead multi-platform/transmedia courses internationally and in Australia with AFTRS and Metro Screen. He also runs MUVEDesign (creating story based augmented reality, virtual worlds and transmedia) and the influential media and marketing site PersonalizeMedia.. Gary will be supported by up to eight high-calibre international and domestic experts.

“The Digital Ignition Multi-platform Clinic falls within the suite of support offered through our All Media Program, which seeks to ignite and strengthen digital understanding, expertise and activity within the Australian screen content sector,” said Screen Australia Investment Manager Mike Cowap. “We’re thrilled to be working with Gary and his StoryLabs network to make this as rich and practical a workshop as possible.”

Founder of StoryLabs Gary Hayes said, “We’ll deliver a highly structured program focused on all the important practical topics, including storytelling, user experience, design, technical, business and marketing. We’ll be using case studies and tried and tested exercises to hone participants’ processes, and ensure they leave with a tangible ‘bible’ and clear list of next steps for their project to get it off the ground.”

What do we really value online and can traditional publishing companies adapt quickly enough to save themselves?

Earlier this week I and a group of social media ‘influencers’ were invited to a briefing by News Ltd of their, two years in the making plans to move to Australia’s first big Freemium news content model. Basic freemium model – a range of teaser online news excerpts leading to fuller, more in-depth news stories behind a pay wall at subscription prices starting at $2.95 a week to $7.95 including the daily printed paper.

Firstly hats off to the large News Ltd operation for taking this ‘if we don’t were damned’ and ‘if we do were also damned’, step. Also for setting up a no-mans land, bridging site, looking at the Future of Journalism. It is really the only thing they can really do at this juncture – so it all comes down to ‘how’ they do it. I and others pointed out during the session that regardless of the mammoth ‘back-end’ production, business and editorial systems upgrade, it really boils down to IF users like the taste of this particular flavour of digital content. Is there a demand for your ‘paid for’ product?

Some heritage news orgs are starting to turn the corner of this ‘experiment’ of course while others have just crashed and burned. Yesterday AdAge reported on New York Times just keeping it’s head above the water with it’s 324 000 and climbing, digital subscribers. It announced that, as it’s print ads decline by 10.4% a quarter it’s digital ads (up 6.2%) and increasing subscribers online are balancing the books, just.

Within the company’s news media division, which includes The New York Times itself as well as the Boston Globe and other newspapers, digital-ad revenue increased 6.2% — slower growth than in the second quarter — while print-ad revenue dropped 10.4% — a sharper decline than last quarter.

In a world of scarcity asking people to pay for ‘information’ or stories about themselves and the wider world makes sense. Get that. But in a world where digital, to a growing number, means free access, open re-distribution, self-publishing and outright plagiarism of those same stories, will ‘paid for news’ ever work?

Lets step back from the granularity of price points and production challenges covered by others for the moment and without getting bogged down in journalistic integrity or endless ‘manipulative’ stats, lets get back to basics.

OK not really a Dummies guide as there are some complex elements in here, but one has to use whatever memes are in vogue 🙂 A few weeks ago I was commissioned by Screen Australia to write a very basic structure & guide for producers relatively new to multi platform content to structure & document their propositions, after they have developed the ‘audience centric’ concepts. This has just been published on the Screen Australia site as a digital resource for those needing to document projects for transmedia productions.

I presented at the end of the inaugural GameTech conference last week before a panel looking beyond console, revenue streams & individual game formats and looking at games breaking out into real space and becoming 24/7 – my talk was entitled

“Pervasive entertainment – entertainment that is all around you, 24 hours a day, persistent – probably location based – possibly merged with real world – driven by devices that are mobile, always on & location aware?” G Hayes

It was great to see industry heads gathered at the beginning of the conference such as this State of Industry panel twitpic I took featuring the Australasian heads of Ubisoft, EAGames, Sony and Microsoft.

As well as a government endorsement introduction from Brendan O’Connor, the Australian Minister for Home Affairs & Digital Culture who talked briefly about games as portable, ubiquitous & networked – yay! He also talked about the R rating for Australia on the way which is a big relief for games distributors!

But my talk later was a broad brushstrokes whirlwind tour at the exiting period we are entering where the promise of ‘technology based’ pervasive entertainment for the last decade or two is getting very close. Another perfect storm as locative play intersperses with augmented reality, where socially produced media becomes embedded into real time broadcast networks and where game is truly dispersed across multiple platforms.

Here is the basic structure of the prez:

What is Pervasive Entertainment / Gaming

What is Multi Platform / Transmedia in a Gaming Context

Games spilling into the real world Evolution of Experiential AR

Business Models of Pervasive AR Entertainment

Futures and Takeaways

The presentation is embedded below but before I launched into the definitions & case studies I asked the game industry audience –

“Who is the games industry? As all aspects of our lives become ‘gamified’ such as shopping, travel, social life, locations & TV/Film, has the games industry lost the initiative by allowing marketeers, AR & transmedia companies, ad agencies, film & TV producers to create & monetize these new pervasive forms of entertainment?”Gary Hayes – GameTech 2011 Sydney

It was too late in the conference for this to be tackled or even mean anything to those locked into AAA console title production line or part of an incumbent traditional media machine. Earlier in the conference there was a sense that if the game is not commoditized (delivered in a nice box on the shelf of the local games store) then it is outside the industry boundaries and therefore let those companies involved in more distributed, transmedia games fight over the scraps. Full slide show follows